OP:Sense--a research platform for surgical robotics

"OP:Sense is a modular platform for research into novel methods for the secure and precise execution of robot-supported operations. The system focuses on supporting and relieving the strain of the surgeon and on providing novel alternatives to conventional surgery. For this purpose, individual modules – both hardware and software components – are combined in a system that is adapted exactly to the operation to be performed. This system is both secure and testable."

"It is a research platform developed for applications in roboter assisted surgery. The system can be used for automatic positioning tasks, like CO2 laser cutting or conventional bone cutting techniques or highly accurate positioning, like needle placement in biopsie. Due to the flexibility of the used lightweight robots the system can also be used for minimal invasive surgery. Also new combinations of MIRS techniques and automatic positioning becomes possible, a semi-autonomous usage of the surgical robotic system. In this paper the focus is to describe the control system developed for OP:sense that enables to use the system in a wide area of surgical applications."

"In current research, haptic feedback in robot assisted interventions plays an important role. However most approaches to haptic feedback only regard the mapping of the current forces at the surgical instrument to the haptic input devices, whereas surgeons demand a combination of medical imaging and telemanipulated robotic setups. In this paper we describe how this feature is integrated in our robotic research platform OP:Sense. The proposed method allows the automatic transfer of segmented imaging data to the haptic renderer and therefore allows enriching the haptic feedback with virtual fixtures based on imaging data. Anatomical structures are extracted from pre-operative generated medical images or virtual walls are defined by the surgeon inside the imaging data. Combining real forces with virtual fixtures can guide the surgeon to the regions of interest as well as helps to prevent the risk of damage to critical structures inside the patient. We believe that the combination of medical imaging and telemanipulation is a crucial step for the next generation of MIRS-systems."

Source: IEEE AMC 2012, Stud Health Technol Inform, OP:Sense